As the level of income has greatly increased, household expenses are rapidly rising in view of range and scale. There happened a large amount of documents that need to keep or manage, such as product purchase receipts, credit card statements, cash receipts, various bills and receipts for utility and tax payment, bills and receipts for apartment maintenance fees, giro papers, insurance policies, and various deal contracts. Under this circumstance, even though there are considerable homes which make existing account book or on-line account book for reasonable household finance, it is difficult to put the purchase information in the account book since many persons frequently purchase various articles at one time in the discount store and often eat out as compared with the past. In other words, upon filling in the account book, it is inconvenient to list all incomes and expenses autobiographically. Further, even in a case of using the computer program, it is inconvenient to enter the purchase information one by one.
From a different point of view, the receipt that the consumer considers not to be important can be often used as an important material. That is, the information contained in the receipt can be used as the important statistical data, from the point of view of the companies of manufacturing and purchasing the products which investigate the statistical material related to consumers' purchasing behavior for their products to improve the marketing decision-making in accordance with the investigated purchasing behavior.
Each company investigates and collects the statistical material related to the consumers' purchasing behavior, by employing his own investigation power to investigate the purchasing behavior directly or requesting a separate investigation agency to investigate it.
However, since the method of investigating it directly do not make the statistical material correct due to a large amount of time and cost as well as insincere answers of the consumers, the company is now using the statistical material produced from the separate investigation agency. For the investigation method (specifically, ad-hoc investigation) which is performed in accordance with a request of the company which requires the statistical material, however, opinion or estimation of the consumers is quiet abstract since the agency asks the consumers for past purchasing experience of a particular product. Therefore, there is a disadvantage in that the consumers' purchasing behavior may not be analyzed in real-time or in long-term trend.
In contrast to it, there is a system based research. This is a factory-made information production method of producing large scale information repetitively, wherein the investigation agency builds the information production system in advance and continuously collects data from the same consumer panels consisted of consumers to produce the purchasing behavior data. Therefore, it is possible to investigate the consumers' purchasing behavior in real time and thereby perform accurate understanding and dynamic analysis of the consumers' purchasing behavior based on repetitive and detailed observation for the same object.
In order to address such problems, there can be used a Patent Registration No. 727402 (registration date: 2007.06.05) applied by the applicant of this invention and titled as “A SYSTEM FOR PROVIDING INFORMATION AND A METHOD OF PROVIDING INFORMATION USING IMAGE DATA OF RECEIPT”.
According to the system for providing information and a method of providing information using image data of receipt, if the image data of all kinds of receipts owned by a plurality of panels belonging to a population are provided to the investigation system sever of the information provider, the information provider may provide the storage service of document such as receipts for the panels while extracting the expenses records data of the panels using the image analyzing system. Therefore, it is possible to facilitate providing the marketing information through collection, accumulation, analysis of the information on actual household expenses and purchasing behaviors and make life easier by providing the information on various household expenses and the storage service of the receipts for the panels providing the materials.
Meanwhile, as the market economy increases, many manufacturers and distribution stores are formed and therefore competition occurs more intensely between each other in order to secure the purchasing customers. It has been mainly used in such a manner that a coupon having a point corresponding to a product price printed thereon is attached to the product. When the customer will submit the coupon to the coupon manager upon purchasing the product, the corresponding point is accumulated for the customer.
However, such manner has disadvantages in that the consumers frequently discard the coupon and therefore the coupon product manufacturer wastes a commission charge that has already paid to the coupon manager since it is convenient to directly submit the coupon to the coupon manager after cutting out the coupon and attaching it to a predetermined form upon purchasing the product, and further it is possible not to obtain correct information on customers purchasing the coupon product from the coupon manager and thereby not to enable developing strategic marketing information for product sales.
Further, there is a disadvantage in that it is not possible to check whether the customer submitting the coupon purchases the corresponding product directly, which results that the coupon product manufacturer has a difficulty on marketing.
Therefore, there has been needed an efficient method of allowing the information provider to be provided with the receipts issued to the consumer via the product purchase and understand the consumers' purchasing pattern easily, allowing the customer to accumulate the points for the coupon product to purchase, and allowing the coupon product manufacturer to be provided with information on the consumers using the coupon product and develop more accurate marketing information.